Spice: A Cook's Companion

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For each spice Mark gives an introduction, a guide to using it, which spice blends it features in, and a list of ingredients that the spice has an affinity with. These are covered alongside familiar spices that I know and use regularly but still appreciate learning more about. Beginning with a guide to 50 of Mark’s much-loved spices and blends, the book then offers over 100 innovative recipes that make the most of your new spice knowledge. Beginning with a guide to 50 of Mark's much-loved spices and blends, including their legacy and main culinary affinities, the book then offers over 100 innovative recipes that make the most of your new spice knowledge.

The Cooks Companion | Harvey Jones The Cooks Companion | Harvey Jones

The reader will become familiar with the differences in flavor intensity, provenance, nutritional benefits and more. Lebkuchen (German spiced honey biscuits) are a seasonal favourite for us in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and these homemade ones didn’t disappoint. Under spice blends (of which there are thirty-nine), there are several I’ve never made before: advieh, Cape Malay spice blend, sweet dukkah, gunpowder mix, hawaij, khmeli-suneli, niter kibbeh, qualat daqqa, svanuri marili, timur ko chop, and tempero baiano.I agree with the pleasure he finds in using a suribachi and surikogi (Japanese grinding bowl and pestle). Bigger Things is full of dishes that are suitable for a main meal (from breakfast through to dinner) and offers recipes like Chipotle eggs in purgatory, Za’atar fruit fattoush, Chorizo and Merguez sausages, Spicy Scotch eggs, Paradise cauliflower soup, Yuki Gomi’s Spicy ramen, Bourride (a French fish soup), Mouclade (lightly curried mussels also from France), Li Ling Wang’s Mapo tofu, Bún riêu (a Vietnamese noodle soup), Lara Lee’s Sambal goreng tempe, Domi-yangnyeom-gui (a Korean fried fish dish), Blackened fish (southern US-style), Maunika Gowardhan’s Punjabi chicken curry, Nanjing salted duck, Doro wat (an Ethiopian spiced stew), Annie Grey’s 18th century English chicken curry, Juniper-brined roast chicken, Babi guling (a Balinese roast pork dish), Barbecue ribs, Zuza Zak’s Bigos (a Polish winter stew), and Pastilla (a North African filo pastry pie). This is a lovely book for any home cook interested in learning more about spices and spice blends, and how to make the best use of them. I love Mark’s note in his Introduction that “ the brilliance of spices [is that] they are – like music, painting and poetry – almost entirely unnecessary and yet utterly essential.

Spice by Mark Diacono | Hardie Grant Publishing

In Spice: A Cook’s Companion he provides advice on how to source and blend spices well, and how to make the best of them in your kitchen. The recipes Mark includes are not only appealing to eat, but also provide plenty of inspiration for using spices more creatively in the kitchen. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.

Spice is a vibrant exploration of flavor, fragrance and heat that majors on the kitchen, with a celebration of over 50 spices that will fill your kitchen with a wealth of heady aromas and tastes.

Spice: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your Mastering Spice: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your

Not all recipes have photos, but many do and these are all taken by Mark; some show the finished dish in its cooking pot or pickle jar, the rest show food or drink served in homely crockery on pleasingly plain surfaces.

The caraway was such a revelation in Basan’s dish that we were immediately drawn to Mark’s Bacon and Caraway Tart as the first recipe to make from Spice. Last comes the Drinks chapter with recipes such as Melon and pineapple tepache (a Mexican fermented drink), Loomi tea (made with dried limes(, Ginger, mace and verbenna berry switchel (a sweet sour drink from the USA), Nutmeg syrup, Sol khadi (a spicy and sour Indian drink), Ginger beer, Spiced rum, Krupnik (a Polish spiced-honey vodka), White dalmation (a pepper-spiced cocktail), Ponche crema (a Venezuelan eggnog), Mulled cider, and Tascalate (a Mexican cold chocolate drink). Mark Diacono is lucky enough to spend most of his time eating, growing, writing and talking about food.

Spice by Mark Diacono | Waterstones Spice by Mark Diacono | Waterstones

I’ve come across references and recipes featuring achiote (aka annato), anise seeds (not the same thing as star anise), cinnamon berries, grains of paradise, kokum, tonka beans, and wattleseed before but never cooked with them. The reader will become familiar with the differences in flavour intensity and provenance and discover how, through the use of spice, we can applaud and appreciate cuisines from around the globe. It’s easy to forget how versatile spices are in sweet dishes, not just savoury, and to this end Mark provides many tempting recipes in the Sweet Things chapter. The book will explore the many origins of spice, when and how to use them effectively, and how, through the use of spice, we can applaud and appreciate cuisines from around the globe.

The recipes build on bringing your spices alive – whether that's creating blends to easily enhance your food when short of time on a weekday evening, or in infusing and blooming spices to bring out the very best of these treasured ingredients. Caraway seeds are used in both the pastry and the tart filling, alongside mustard and fresh parsley, but it’s in the pastry that the spice really shines. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.